I barely go to Ulta anymore, but one experience that comes to mind for me is when I was back in college. My college roommate and her best friend came along too (two Black girls and one Filipino girl). When we were there to browse the perfumes and such, there were only a couple of reps in the store probably because it was so late. One of them was a nice Hijabi girl who greeted us and told us to let her know if we needed anything.

But then it got weird. Literally she kept on glancing at us and at one point got up and started following us about the store. My roommate is like “watch this”, and got us to turn a corner with her, only to see the same rep turn her corner further back so that we were still in her view. This kept going the entire time we were in the store. The experience was disheartening, not only because we experienced it but because it was with another POC.

Until these stories blew up, I honestly didn’t know that Ulta Beauty did makeovers. The fact that so many of them don’t have staff that know how to work with shades darker than tan is a problem.